SUFFOLK CLOSEUP Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory's Legacy Of Eugenics

SUFFOLK CLOSEUP

By Karl Grossman

 The Eugenics Record Office at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, a private research facility in Suffolk County, was pivotal to the spread of eugenics through the United States and world as detailed in a forthcoming book by Mark A. Torres, “Long Island and the Legacy of Eugenics: Station of Intolerance.”

Ultimately discredited as a pseudoscience, eugenics “aimed to develop a master race of human beings,” notes Torres. 

The Eugenics Record Office at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory operated from 1910 to 1939—and pushed eugenics throughout the U.S. and the world. 

On its website, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in a section labeled its “History” has an essay on a “historical perspective on genetics” headlined: “Good genes, bad science.”  It begins relating how in the early 1900s “the bogus concept of hereditary criminality and a made-up disease known as feeblemindedness became part of some scientists’ so-called studies of genetics. Ideas such as these were the core of the American eugenics movement….in which science got mixed up with racial dogma.”

“Many of Hitler’s beliefs were directly inspired by the eugenics books he read while he was in prison,” writes Torres. (Hitler was jailed for the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923, an attempted coup in Munich led by members of his Nazi Party. Convicted of treason, he was sentenced to five years in jail and served nine months.) Hitler “admired,” Torres says, “the policies of the American eugenics program, including the efforts that led to the passage of strict immigration laws in the United States.” 

In 1933, Hitler “seized power,” and “eugenics presented Hitler with a…globally accepted science to support his sinister plans. In July 1933, Germany enacted the ‘Law for the Prevention of Defective Progeny,’ the first eugenic sterilization law in the country.” A publication put out by the Eugenics Record Office, Eugenical News, featured the law “proudly,” says Torres.

Soon “German eugenicists began to formulate definitions of Jewishness. Hitler insisted that Jews of all degrees to be identified, including those with at least one drop of Jewish blood.” The “methodology was fully inspired by the family pedigree system created at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory more than two decades before,” writes Torres. 

With the massive sending of Jews and others to death camps, Hitler “directed…doctors at different concentration camps to conduct a wide range of eugenics-based research.”

The book includes a chapter on the impact of eugenic advocates on U.S. immigration law, titled “’Scientific Racism’ and the Anti-Immigration Movement.” Torres writes about how Harry Laughlin, superintendent of the Eugenics Record Office from its inception to closure, sent a report to the U.S. Congress in 1922 labeling certain immigrants “human waste.” Writes Torres: “Page after page, the report was rife with racial and ethnic slurs and detailed statistics regarding feeblemindedness, insanity, crime, various forms of illness and deformity and ‘all types of social inadequacy.’”

Laughlin testified before Congress in 1922 asserting: “These degeneracies and hereditary handicaps are inherent in the blood.” 

Before Congress again, in 1924, “elaborate charts” were displayed by Laughlin “promoting the link between the so-called inferior races and immoral conduct.” 

“As a direct result of Laughlin’s tireless efforts, which were driven by his eugenic ideals coupled with lawmakers’ growing racial animus against immigrants, the House and Senate passed the Immigration Act of 1924,” writes Torres. “The law imposed even stricter quotas on immigrants from all non-Nordic nations. For example, the quota on immigration from Italy was dramatically reduced from forty-two thousand per year to just four thousand.”

The Eugenics Record Office was also busy “in local communities on Long Island and throughout New York State. In August 1921, a group of neighboring families on Babylon Road in Commack were subjected to eugenic studies.” It got involved in psychiatric hospitals in Suffolk: Kings Park Psychiatric Center, Central Islip State and Pilgrim State in Brentwood.  

Laws were passed in the U.S. to mandate sterilization based on the claims of eugenics.  Torres focuses on a 1927 U.S. Supreme Court 8-to-1 decision upholding a “request by the State of Virginia to forcefully sterilize nineteen-year-old Carrie Buck based on a eugenics diagnosis.” She was determined to be “feebleminded.” The ruling, written by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. “has never been reversed,” writes Torres, himself an attorney. “It is an enduring legacy left by the Eugenics Record Office and a direct byproduct of the ERO’s work. In the wake of the decision, the number of sterilizations across the country began to grow exponentially.” 

The decision, says Torres, “was so impactful that, in November 1946, the Nazi doctors who were on trial in Nuremberg cited it in defense of the atrocities they had committed during the Second World War.” Among the doctors convicted and executed for crimes against humanity for the Nazi “euthanasia program” was Karl Brandt who was also “the personal physician of Adolph Hitler.”

Torres’ book will be out on June 21 and is being published by The History Press.

In an interview, Torres emphasized how eugenics “was not a fringe movement. It was the rage of the age. It was widely embraced.”

Regarding education, his book cites a 1916 ERO report stating that 254 colleges taught courses on eugenics. He writes: “At Boston University, eugenics was taught to students at the School of Theology.” NYU, Columbia and Barnard “each offered a eugenics-based course….Other New York colleges that taught eugenics” listed include Adelphi, Cornell, Colgate, Farmingdale, Fordham, Syracuse University and Vassar. 

Also, “eugenics was a regularly offered course in the biology department at San Francisco State University from 1916 to 1951.”

The year 1951 was decades after the Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory was shut down. In recent years, what eugenics is about has continued as an issue. 

In 2007, Dr. James Watson, chancellor of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and a Nobel Prize winner, was “relieved” of his post after saying in an interview with the London Times that there was an intelligence gap between Blacks and whites and this accounted for many of the problems in Africa. In 2019, the laboratory stripped Watson of titles he still held including chancellor emeritus after he appeared on a PBS documentary “American Masters: Decoding Watson,” and asked if he changed his views, he said: “No. Not at all….there’s a difference on the average between Blacks and whites on I.Q tests. I would say the difference is…genetic.”

Last month, Laura Helmuth, editor-in-chief of Scientific American, resigned after complaints about comments she made including, online, that “Trump’s racist rants are straight-up eugenics.” An article in the magazine in October scored Trump’s statements about immigrants, its headline saying they were in the “Language of Eugenics.” Helmuth from 2016 to 2018 was president of the National Association of Science Writers.

And this month, New York magazine featured an article headed: “A Rift in the Family, My in-laws gave me a book by a eugenicist. Our relationship is over.” 

Karl Grossman is a veteran investigative reporter and columnist, the winner of numerous awards for his work and a member of the L.I. Journalism Hall of Fame. He is a professor of journalism at SUNY at Old Westbury and the author of six books.